The Devil Conspiracy is the Jesus DNA Clone Horror Fantasy We've Been Waiting For!

This movie is legit bonkers!

In The Devil Conspiracy an evil biotech company has the ability to create clones of the most famous and important figures in history from DNA. Can you even imagine how exciting that would be? 

In this fantastical world you could create an entire society run by clones of Soundcloud rapper Li’l Peep. Or you could create the ultimate rock and super-group out of the DNA of the dead. 

You’d have Li’l Peep on vocals, of course. I’d want Charles Manson on vocals as well. We’d have Davy Jones on tambourine,   Shannon Hoon on back-up vocals and Ringo Starr on drums, bass, synthesizer, electric guitar, sitar and theremin.

I know that Ringo Starr is still alive and only plays the drums but I’m a big fan and I’d love to see him challenge himself by learning new instruments in his eighties. 

But The Devil Conspiracy is not about a utopian society run by clones of a popular, charismatic Soundcloud rapper. Nor is it about the ultimate rock and roll supergroup made out of clones of the dead and occasionally the living. It’s instead about the sinister machinations of the devil, Jesus’ DNA, and an unfortunate woman who ends up knocked up by evil. 

The Devil Conspiracy introduces the irresistibly cheesy concept of bringing back the legendary dead through DNA then does nothing with it. In a tantalizing early scene, scientists in league with Beelzebub introduce a crowd of wealthy degenerates to a curly-haired child violinist they’re informed is the reborn Antonio Vivaldi.

The DNA of Michelangelo is then auctioned off to the highest bidder, at which point the movie completely loses interest in the DNA of anyone other than Jesus, which can be found in the Shroud of Turin. 

A Satanist cabal wants to use the Jesus DNA found within the Shroud of Turin to liberate their Lord and Master the Anti-Christ to create a new, evil messiah who will empower hell’s minions to escape their brutal realm and take over earth. 

Alice Orr-Ewing stars in The Devil Conspiracy as Laura Milton, a sturdy staple of Christian entertainment: an oblivious atheist convinced  that everything can be explained through science and reason and that concepts like faith and belief have no place in our secular modern world. 

She learns otherwise when she is kidnapped by the titular demonic plot so that the Devil, who is imprisoned in hell by God, can fill her with his demon seed so that she might deliver his baby and help him rule a sinful world. 

Nothing cures a non-believer of disbelief quite like being forced to be the Devil’s baby mama. It’s Rosemary’s Baby for idiots as a woman who suddenly believes very deeply in the presence of God, Jesus and the Devil tries to avoid unleashing the ultimate evil upon an unsuspecting world. 

Before she’s abducted for the most sinful of purposes Laura tries to convince her hot priest friend Father Marconi (Joe Doyle) that God doesn’t exist and that God and the Devil are merely abstract concepts. 

He doesn’t seem convinced on account of being a priest and all. He is a man of ferocious faith who, in his dying moments, prays that his body might become a powerful vessel for the Lord to use however he sees fit. 

God takes him up on his offer. The spirit of the Archangel Michael takes over Marconi’s sexy body and uses it to keep his brother Lucifer from taking over the world. The Satan-whooping badass chooses to take over Marconi’s body specifically because he is a righteous man of faith and also a total babe, a heavenly hunk, a divine dish. He basically looks like the star of every CW show ever. 

Ah, but this is NOT your father’s Archangel Michael. He makes up his own rules. He breaks all the rules. He even breaks the rules that he himself made up earlier. THAT’s how big of a rebel he is. 

The Devil Conspiracy gives us an Archangel Michael for a new generation, one who kicks demon butt first and asks for permission later. The Devil Conspiracy’s Archangel Michael is seemingly also an angel who fucks but that is one line this most unusual Christian film is unwilling to cross. 

So while Michael is sexy and virile he does not actually have sex. Maybe they’re saving that for the sequel. The Devil Conspiracy portrays Michael as an edgy Christian superhero whose powers and abilities change radically from scene to scene depending on the demands of the plot. 

He’s a super-powered force for good in a leather trench coat who is uniquely qualified to fight the forces of supreme evil because Lucifer is his brother so they go way, way back. 

The title character is no handsome devil or charming rogue. He is instead a demon, a beast, a hideous monster from hell. Most Christian movies are like Ned Flanders: milquetoast, disgustingly wholesome, PG at worst, bland, white-bread and nauseatingly obsessed with serving Jesus. 

Not the R-rated, violent and ghoulish The Devil Conspiracy. It offers a vision of the war between good and evil whose iconography seems derived largely from the covers of 1980s heavy metal albums. 

CGI technology has become cheap enough that a modestly budgeted Christsploitation movie like The Devil Conspiracy can semi-professionally depict a hell full of demons and monsters and other cursed creatures out of the vivid imaginations and spiral notebooks of both the devout and metal loving teen stoners in the 1980s. 

It’s not unusual for a Christian movie to argue that Satan is real. It is, however, unusual for a Christian movie to posit that not only is Satan real, but he’s fucking coming for you, and he’s brought a whole army with him, as The Devil Conspiracy does. 

The Devil Conspiracy occupies a curious moral realm where God feels conspicuously absent. Michael seems to have taken it upon himself to adopt a human form in order to battle his ultimate nemesis.

Our swaggering hero seems weirdly convinced that God is so preoccupied that he won’t even notice that his former employee is up to his old tricks, and by the time he becomes hip to Satan’s shenanigans the whole sorry situation will have sorted itself out. 

The Devil Conspiracy does not give the devil his due. The Prince of Darkness has disappointingly vanilla taste. He could ostensibly choose any woman to be his unholy bride and carry his progeny in their haunted womb but he inexplicably chooses a blandly pretty blonde who proves a shockingly formidable adversary. 

Satan gets all self-pitying when things don’t go his way. He’s the ultimate boss from hell as well as a pouty little bitch. It’s a unique portrayal of the devil as both an inhuman monster and an insufferable middle manager. 

The Devil Conspiracy is pure B-movie pulp, a ghoulish throwback to the apocalyptic thrillers that flourished at the turn of the millennium like Left Behind and The Omega Code.

I wrote about a lot of those movies for The A.V Club early in my career so I have a distinct nostalgia for this particularly cheesy subsection of trash cinema. The Devil Conspiracy is wonderfully, enthusiastically bad but it’s never boring. 

It’s not quite as insane as it could be considering that it deals with clones of famous people throughout history, but just barely. But The Devil Conspiracy commits to the lunacy of its premise with enough wild-eyed conviction to make it stand out in a sea of interchangeable Godly fare. 

The Devil Conspiracy is nuts. I mean that in a positive way.